Going on Being-Without: How Relationships to Things Matter in Ecological Crisis

Much of the anguish and terror surrounding ecological catastrophe resides in unspoken, unregistered, places. Something about human economic-material relations enables and perpetuates this unspeakability – which fortifies defensive denial and accelerates the catastrophe. Can its speaking therefore help mitigate catastrophe? Might it keep us more psychically alive and able to meet the challenge, even now, in a living world under siege? This paper draws on recent decades of psychoanalytic scholarship addressing the relationship of humans with the “more-than-human” world, emphasizing an Object Relations perspective on psychic development and sustenance. It suggests that we have “lost touch” with our environmental embeddedness. And that this has birthed corresponding “anxieties of being” which bring about other socially prevalent defensive manoeuvres against the loss. It then draws in the Marxian concept of “alienation,” to explain how socio-structural relations under technocapitalism have contributed to both this loss of embeddedness as well as its unrecognizability, rendering it hidden, impossible to bear or bare. How? With the illusion of limitless “having,” which is offered by a capitalistic relational structure and its compensatory materialism. Compensatory having allows loss to continue, unchecked by recognition and reckoning. This illusion disavows loss, vulnerability and dependence while also intensifying them, creating a cycle of destruction. In describing this movement, the conversation constructed here hopes – through an insight into the interconnected ecological webs of the psyche, social world, and environment – to disturb something in the annihilatory flows of this cycle.